The PPE gold rush... Vast quantities of public money are disappearing into unknown companies...
- Freedom Media Platform
- Jul 20, 2020
- 2 min read
Updated: Nov 7, 2020
We present an interesting article comparing the Government's spending on PPE to the Klondike* Gold Rush scam, that also introduces the investigations of British barrister Jolyon Maugham QC (of Devreux Chambers) who has launched a Crowd Justice campaign as part of the Good Law project, to start litigation against the government:
We can see that the Government has spent a whopping £252.5m on a company that has no obvious experience in supplying safety gear, called Ayanda Capital Limited, and that there are numerous other contracts including £108m to a company called Crisps Websites (trading as Pestfix Limited) and then a suspiciously similar amount of £108m went to Clandboye Agencies Limited.
Also found was a contract for £18.5m to an employment agency called Aventis Solutions Ltd. With the exception of Ayanda Capital all of these companies had little or hardly any assets to begin with. Subsequently they have inflated their assets by extraordinary sums. Ayanda Capital is owned by the Horlick family through an entity based in the tax haven of Mauritius.
There is a connection between Ayanda and a man called Andrew Mills who, although not an officer of the company, is nevertheless a senior board adviser according to his Linked-in profile. He also claims to be an adviser to the Department of Trade, where Liz Truss is the secretary of state and a member of the cabinet.
Most worrying of all, it seems that all of these contracts were awarded without any competition as the only tenderers. Information on all of these contracts was accessible via the EU's TED (Tenders Electronic Daily) website which will be unavailable post-Brexit transition period. After this time we will have even less scrutiny on the contracts process as it hides itself behind closed doors to make critical buying decisions with money from the public purse.
Note:
* The Klondike Gold Rush was a migration by an estimated 100,000 prospectors to the Klondike region of the Yukon, in north-western Canada, between 1896 and 1899. Gold was discovered there by local miners on August 16, 1896, and, when news reached Seattle and San Francisco the following year, it triggered a stampede of prospectors. Some became wealthy, but the vast majority went in vain.
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